Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Daydreams and Night Things: Punch’s George du Maurier

By John Adcock

George du Maurier’s dream strip “Tom
Noddy’s Christmas Nightmare” was drawn in late 1891 and echoed in its title an earlier strip by John Leech from Punch Vol. 28, March 10, 1855, “Mr.
Tom Noddy’s First Day With the Hounds After the Long Frost.” Leech’s “Mr. Tom
Noddy” appeared in four full-panel strip pages and two single-panel cartoons over the
following weeks. Leech was not the originator of sequential comic art in Punch,
and “Mr. Tom Noddy” was not the first recurring character. Volume 14 of Punch for 1853 carried eight pages of
“Mr. Peter Piper” by an unknown artist, and in Punch, Vol. 28, 1855, there were two series, one featuring the
character “Mr. Spoonbill,” and a two-part “Mr. Popplewit.”

Both Leech and du Maurier’s works were reproduced by wood
engraving but the technology had changed by the nineties. John Leech was of the
old school, he had been drawing comicalities on the wood soon after C.J. Grant
illustrated the “Pickwick Songster.” John Leech (signing J.L.), in company
with the brothers Cruikshank, Robert Seymour, and Kenny Meadows, contributed
comic cuts to Bell’s Life in London and
Sporting Chronicle.

In February 1836,
young Charles Dickens, a reporter on the Morning
Chronicle, agreed to write a serial text to accompany comic prints by the
caricaturist Robert Seymour. The first installment on March 31, 1836, was
entitled “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club containing a faithful
record of the Perambulations, Perils, Travels, Adventures and Sporting
Transactions of the Corresponding members.” These numbers were edited by “Boz”
(as Dickens signed) for Chapman & Hall, and contained four comic illustrations by Robert Seymour.

“Pickwick” was modeled on the illustrated penny part serials
produced by the “unstamped” and was to prove an inestimable influence on the
future of comic art and the rise of the illustrated book, newspaper, and
magazine. G.W.M. Reynolds’s shilling piracy “Pickwick Abroad; or, the Tour in
France” was illustrated with steel engravings by caricaturist Alfred Crowquill.

Punch; or; the London Charivari wasmodeled
on the French comic periodical Charivari,
and first published on July 17, 1841. The originator of Punch was a wood-engraver named Ebenezer Landells, who
passed his proprietorship on to Bradbury & Evans. The wood-engraving
factory was taken over by Joseph Swain, Sr. The editor from 1841 to 1870 was Mark
Lemon [with Henry Mayhew]. Shirley
Brooks edited from 1870 to 1874, Tom Taylor from 1874 to 1880, and F.C.
Burnand from 1880 to 1906. Each bound volume of Punch from 1842 to 1899 included a Punch’s Almanack.

When John Leech produced “Tom Noddy” he would have drawn
each panel separately, in ink, onto a single block of wood. For the final
printing the boxwood images would be fitted together with brass bolts to make
one full page caption strip. By the time du Maurier drew “Tom Noddy’s Christmas
Nightmare” in 1891 the ink drawings were photographed directly onto the boxwood.
There was a good reason for the lack of speech “bubbles” in Victorian comics,
and it had to do with the time-wasting cost of having woodpeckers chisel out
every letter onto the wood block. Type-setting was cheaper and faster.

George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier was born in Paris on
March 6, 1834 to a French father and an English mother, and educated at London,
Antwerp and Dusseldorf. He studied life-drawing at Gleyre’s atelier in Paris where he befriended the
Impressionist painter Whistler.

At Antwerp in 1857 du Maurier
suddenly lost sight in one eye. For the rest of his life he lived in fear of
total blindness. “It has poisoned all my existence,” he told an interviewer. Inspired
by Leech’s cartoons in the Punch’s
Almanack he moved to London in hopes of gaining a berth on Punch. His friendship with Charles Keene
[elected to the Punch staff in 1860],
who drew full comic pages before du Maurier took his knife to the Punch Table,
was probably a factor in his own adoption of the comic strip format.

The young du Maurier was a snob,
who looked forward to the day “when illustrating for the millions (swinish
multitude) à la Phiz and à la Gilbert will give place to real art, more
expensive to print and engrave and therefore only within the means of more
educated classes, who will appreciate more.” [The Young George Du Maurier, p.36, April 1861]

Du Maurier was referring to
illustration, and it seems was unaware that in 1851 and 1852 two installments
of “The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, an Oxford Freshman,” a strip by Cuthbert Bede,
were published in The Illustrated London
News. This high quality experiment led to full-page
color and b&w comic strip pages in The
Graphic, The Illustrated Times, and The
Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News. Most of the artistic contributors
had trained in Fine Art and worked as illustrators on magazines, books, and
illustrated comic papers.

His background was in the Fine
Arts and he was primarily an illustrator. The older generation of book and
magazine illustrators, Cruikshank, “Phiz,” and Leech, were caricaturists first
and foremost. Du Maurier had a tough time getting started in illustration. In
the beginning he was entirely dependent on sales to Once a Week, Good Words, the
occasional Punch cartoon or initial
letter.

His first contribution to Punch was a single-panel design
published October 6, 1860. Du Maurier used himself, the painter Whistler, T.R.
Lamont, and the photographer Herbert Watkins as models for the characters. He
was to continue this practice, using his own wife, children, friends and dogs
as models for his cartoons. Portrayals of “Mr. and Mrs. Tom Tit” and “Tom
Noddy” were based on du Maurier and his family. Du Maurier was still a
freelance, hoping for a staff job at Punch,
and used Whistler’s image again in a tiny caricature initial letter “Q.”

It
was not until John Leech lay dying in 1864 that du Maurier became a
full-fledged member of the Punch staff.
He was proposed by Tenniel and Keene and accepted on November 1, 1864,
immediately taking over John Leech’s job designing the cartoons for the latest Punch’s Almanack. “Don’t do funny
things,” advised Mark Lemon, “do the graceful side of life; be the tenor in
Punch’s opera-bouffe.”

The majority of du Maurier’s
cartoons were single-panel jokes which took place in the drawing rooms of the
upper-middle classes and outdoor scenes on country estates. There was another
side to his art, strip-like panels based on dreams and nightmares. Henry James Jr. wrote
in 1888, in The Century, that

“we
fancy him much more easily representing quiet, harmonious things than depicting
deeds of violence. It is a noticeable fact that in “Punch,” where he has his
liberty, he very seldom represents such deeds. His occasional departure from
this habit are of a sportive and fantastic sort, in which he ceases to pretend
to be real; like the dream of the timorous Jenkins (February 15, 1868), who
sees himself hurled to destruction by a colossal, foreshortened cab-horse. Du
Maurier’s fantastic – we speak of the extreme manifestations of it – is
always admirable, ingenious, unexpected, pictorial; so much so, that we have
often wondered that he should not have cultivated this vein more largely.”

George du Maurier achieved fame
as a writer with two novels that had dreamlike qualities; Peter Ibbetson (1891) and Trilby (1894). A
third novel, The Martian, was being
serialized in Harper’s when du
Maurier died in London, on October 8, 1896, of heart and lung weaknesses, probably
brought on by his excessive lifelong nicotine habit.

Profile

Cartoonist, illustrator, storyteller, born in Nelson, B.C. in May 1950, has contributed to Chronicle, Weirdom, and Visions fanzines. John illustrated ‘Ronald and the Dragon’ by Lawrie Peters in 1975. Email: adcock34@gmail.com